This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Back in 2021, Reuters published the following about the Ghislaine Maxwell trial:
"not accused of wrongdoing," LOL, when the guy's a f***ing pimp. The Online Right could use this to dunk on the dishonest mainstream media and in defense of high-minded Western ideals like telling the truth and not putting much stock in the testimony of admitted drug-using pimps and hookers. Instead, the Online Right has gone in a very different direction, being convinced that it would severely disrupt the status quo if they could prove the Epstein murder/pedo ring conspiracy is true. ActuallyATleilaxuGhola asserts that the only reason people would doubt that Epstein was murdered is a desire to avoid a backlash against the status quo or Jews:
I think it's the "Epstein was murdered" people who are engaging in motivated reasoning, since the evidence for the conspiracy is very weak. Instead of another perhaps pointless argument about the evidence, let's look at the underlying assumption that "exposure" of the supposed conspiracy would "disrupt the status quo." Would that actually happen?
Suppose the Clintons, New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, Prince Andrew, Jean-Luc Brunel, a few Democratic Senators and governors and a bunch of celebrities go to prison for "pedophilia."(more on that later) Throw in some top FBI/CIA people responsible for the Epstein murder.
Here's what won't happen. They will not go to white separatists, revolutionary communists, trad Catholics, and the Nation of Islam and say "your hands are clean, now it's your turn to exercise power." Governors will appoint replacements for Senators. Minor actors will receive major actors' roles. The bank's vice president will replace the imprisoned CEO. Gavin Newsom, Kamala Harris, and Pete Buttigieg, who were too unimportant at the time to be associated with Epstein, will still be there. It might even benefit the Democrats by clearing out the gerontocrats.
You may say that, over the long term, voters will be more open to anti-establishment voices. I wouldn't be so sure. Won't take long for the establishment to come up with its equivalent of "the Soviet Union failed because it wasn't communist enough." They'll point out that the vast majority of the accused/convicted individuals are men, so we need more control of male sexuality. Most of the Epstein victims were 16 or 17. "Pedo ring" people don't talk about this fact, gambling that fear of being called a pedophile will dissuade people from bringing it up. But if you want there to be a "reckoning" over this, it's unavoidable. If it's your position that attraction to 16-17 yo girls is "pedophilia" and there's a national emergency of "pedophiles" in positions of power, why not just bar heterosexual men from positions of power? After all, most are "pedophiles" by that definition. Indeed, the establishment might use the necessity of preventing further pedo rings as justification for Patriot Act-style restrictions on civil liberties. You might not fall for that, but what about the average 55-year-old woman who gets all her news from the MSM?
Thankfully the pedo rings don't in fact exist. Hopefully Rightists will grow more comfortable in saying so. Epstein conspiracism is not only wrong on the facts, it's a pointless political dead-end.
These men aren't being lambasted for being attracted to 16-17 yo girls. Men are being lambasted for fucking them with dubious consent and legality. It's the difference between desiring money and defrauding. Impulse control.
Furthermore, having extremely restrictive rules of engagement for hoi polloi while the billionaire elites get away with it is a cucked attitude.
Elites should not be breaking the law, they are supposed to be exemplars. Higher standing, higher rewards, higher standards. The FBI and CIA especially are not supposed to be breaking the law, they're supposed to be enforcing it.
How are you supposed to have a functioning country if the elites and officials are basically robbers, here for temporary gain, don't believe in anything except personal gratification (financial or sexual), don't care about enforcing rules evenly, take bribes or implicit promises of favours from powerful figures, take revenge on you if you report them? This is third-worldism not in the geopolitical sense but the social sense, third-world values. 'We shouldn't report or rally against the corrupt official because maybe the central government will punish us in retribution' is a supremely servile attitude. The Taliban were formed in large part to massacre child rapists amongst the warlords of Afghanistan. We may not share all their values but at least they believed in something more than short-term political gains, that's surely a large part of why they won the war. Why should those from the richest, strongest, most cultured nations hold lower standards than illiterate Afghans?
The rule of law is usually only brought up to justify judges or international courts nobody's ever heard of issuing strange and bizarre orders but this is a core example of where the rule of law should be invoked. No cover ups.
It’s just extremely disingenuous to suggest that warlords raping 8 year old boys is the same as Prince Andrew having sex with a 17 year old who may or may not have been a prostitute.
I support the latter being illegal, but there are obviously tiers of criminality. The sad reality of prostitution is that a large, disproportionate number of prostitutes are 16/17 and lie about their age, particularly in the poorest parts of the west, street walkers and truck stop sex workers, sometimes escorts on seeking arrangement / sugar baby sites too. Underclass and working class men hire them all the time without consequence, buying into the implicit suggestion they are adults if their conscience cares at all (it usually doesn’t).
It’s like the outrage over rich young actresses fucking ugly fat producers to become movie stars. I sympathize, but these are not the top victims of male predation. The purchasers of sex do something I think is wrong, but they aren’t worse than the millions of other men who do the same every day.
I would argue that Epstein and his guests are different from random truckers in that they purposefully selected for underage. If Epstein had hired 18yo's from escort websites only, this thing would be an absolute non-story, and nobody except a few prudes and feminists would get upset.
Being a sex worker at a truck stop is very likely not a great job. I would expect that the pay is lousy (because your clients do not have a lot of disposable income), it is rather dangerous (because "trucker", unlike "bank executive" does not filter for "intelligent person with an appropriate discounting function who will avoid any homicides they will not get away with") and that the clients are not particularly hot or skilled at sex. If you can make ends meet using OnlyFans or doing escort work, that seems much preferable. So I can totally see that this job selects for 16yo runaways who need to pay for their next meal or their next dose, and have neither the wardrobe nor the age to make it in the more respectable branches of sex work (where underage is likely a hard no, because it attracts the eye of Sauron like little else except murder).
Unlike the US, I have no problem with prostitution per se. I certainly do not think minors should be prostitutes, but also admit that I have no good way to align the incentives of a 16yo drug addict to that end. Still, I think informed consent is as important for sex work as for any sex act.
Some time ago, there was a scandal where some porn company would hire women for what they claimed to be modelling (or something similarly tame), then get into a plane to some other city, and suddenly be confronted with the fact that they would be shooting hardcore porn instead. This put the women in a position where they could either walk out, and find themselves in a city which they knew nothing about without a return ticket home, or they could conform with the expressed opinion of the set crew that shooting porn was not a big deal and believe their lies that their video would only be sold to foreign collectors and not be put on the internet. Eventually, the company got sued and is out of business now, and good riddance. By contrast, no hooker who climbs into a truck is under any illusion that the truck driver is going to do a photo shoot to kick off her modelling career. She might still get raped when the trucker violates the agreed boundaries, but that would then at least be a criminal matter (not that this would buy her anything, realistically).
Now, in theory, it could be that Epstein recruited his victims by driving to local truck stops and telling the sex workers: "I am currently recruiting underage prostitutes for a sex party. Here is a brief detailing transportation, accommodations, sex acts, payment, and safe words. Please read it, think about it for a week and then mail me what sex acts you feel comfortable with and I will get back to you."
However, in my world model, this is exceedingly unlikely. It is seems far more likely that the girls travelling on the Lolita express had at best a vague idea what would be required of them, and then were coerced in pretty much the same way as the victims of that unethical porn company were, except worse, because they were underage and actually trapped on an island.
I base this on my general impression of Epstein's MO wrt consent and also one major thing which I think is appealing in men about young partners, which is sexual inexperience. If you want an eager escort who has a great technique in oral sex, your ideal woman is likely a 25-30yo who has given head a few thousand times in her life and perfected her game, not a 16yo hooker. On priors, I don't think that Epstein specifically recruited virgins for his guests, because most of his guests would not appreciate a woman who curls down on the floor and starts crying when she is told what is expected of her, but I think that the whole setup was pretty much build around maximizing the power difference, his guests were probably into making their victims submit to sex acts which were way out of their comfort zone.
My impression is that Epstein's clients were not particularly requesting for underage, that was Epstein himself, and that he deliberately recruited teenaged girls who were vulnerable because they did not have great lives with bright futures ahead. 100% of these girls understood when getting on the plane that 'I need you to work a high end party' meant 'have sex with the guests'- especially because my impression is that, like most pimps, Epstein himself was having sex with them.
It seems likely to me that many of Epstein's guests were getting off on the taboo aspect of having sex with minors. I doubt that 'power differentials' are a big part of the explanation for the simple reason that his guests already have a very high power differential compared to the vast majority of possible partners. Epstein wasn't offering anything special enough there to make committing crimes appealing.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link